BW Online | November 9, 2000 | Rethinking the Nuts, Bolts, and Beams of Building

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NOVEMBER 9, 2000

ENTREPRENEUR PROFILES

Rethinking the Nuts, Bolts, and Beams of Building
An MIT professor's system for analyzing complex construction-project innovations lands her at the head of a startup

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Sarah Slaughter worked as a carpenter while successfully pursuing her PhD in civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was always curious about using new materials in construction -- and techniques that might improve it.

She says that wielding 2x4s was easy compared to getting construction managers to try something new. They always told her some version of, "Sounds good, but not on this project. We'll try it on the next one." It's behind schedule, overbudget, or too complicated were the most frequently used excuses. Of course, the next project also always turned out to have complications that made it too risky to use a new material or process.

Slaughter wanted to remove some of the uncertainty, and thus risk, from construction innovations. To do that, she needed a way to assess the effect that changes in design, construction methods, or materials would have on the cost, duration, crew size, and worker safety of any particular project. What if the steel beams and columns were connected with a new, boltless technique -- how much time would it save or add? Would more workers, or fewer, be needed? What about the effect on other aspects of the construction process?

12 PROCESSES. With a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Slaughter, who now teaches at MIT, went to work. "I had students climbing all over construction projects, taking time and motion studies," she says. Her team studied the minutiae of 12 processes that are common to most building construction: installing structural steel, wood framing, cast concrete, glass or metal curtain wall, hot-water heating, heating/ventilation/air conditioning, fire protection, plumbing, electrical wiring, interior stud walls, and ceilings.

Working with forward-thinking contractors in each of these construction specialties, Slaughter developed a computer model of a typical five-story office building. Then, using the data she and her students had collected from more than 200 construction sites, they created a detailed computerized simulation of each part of the construction process and applied it to the office building. That gave them a baseline, confirmed by industry specialists as realistic, from which to measure the effects of changing basic materials or methods.

Having that kind of data is what allowed her to show Boston contractors Kennedy and Rossi that they shaved 20% off the usual cost and 30% off the usual time of installing plumbing during a dorm-room renovation by cutting and pre-assembling some of the piping off-site and bringing it to the dorm ready to install.

In the case of connecting steel beams and columns, doing so without bolts has a ripple effect. Not only does it reduce the amount of time ironworkers spend on a beam but it stabilizes the entire structure more quickly, so floors can be put up more quickly.

STARTUP TIME. Once Slaughter knew the MOCA system worked, she knew it could applied to more complicated building projects than a typical five-story office building. After five years -- and 65,000 hours -- of developing and refining the system, Slaughter started getting calls from construction managers. They were saying, "You've been talking about this for a long time. Let's have the model," she says. The trouble was, they wanted her on-site to walk them through it, something impossible to work into her professor's schedule. "A friend said, 'Sarah, this is the point when most people start companies,'" she remembers.

So she did. MOCA Inc., an acronym for "models of construction activities," was founded in mid-1999. Earlier this year, she raised $1.1 million from angel investors, including relatives. Her 13 employees include two former students who quit their jobs and moved back to Boston to join MOCA.

The MOCA system will be available through the Internet to account holders by mid-2001. For now, it's available in a more limited format to clients as the MOCA team finishes refining and testing it.

"POWERFUL TOOL." "It's really amazing, actually," says Jim Sippel of Vanderweil Engineers, who is project manager for the new Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. Slaughter put some of the early-stage design documents for the convention center through her computer model to assess the pros and cons of reconfiguring the heating/ventilation/air-conditioning system while the design was still in the early stages. "It's a powerful tool for construction phasing, labor allocation, efficiency, and safety," Sippel says. "When you hear it described, you think, how could a computer analyze that, and yet it can."

Slaughter emphasized that her system isn't meant to be a substitute for experience and judgment, but to augment it. "It's a decision support system," she says. "The computer keeps track of all those little things that you can't hold in your head" every time you want to measure the impact of a design change or a materials substitute on the construction process.

MOCA plans to charge clients a monthly subscription on a per-project basis, which will vary according to the size and complexity of the building. Each project will remain in the individual client's MOCA archive, becoming part of his database. The rapid pace of innovation in construction technology and the severe labor shortage in the industry provides added incentive for builders to use Slaughter's system to get maximum efficiency from materials and labor, she says.

BREAK-EVEN POINT. Since the technology was developed on MIT time and with MIT resources, Slaughter negotiated an exclusive license for three years, after which MIT can license the technology to others. She's looking for $7 million to $10 million in venture capital to finance the company until mid-2002, when she expects MOCA will have reached the break-even point.

While Slaughter is optimistic about having the funding by yearend and she believes that her system could be a real boon for the changing construction industry, whether it will be embraced by either VCs or hard hats is a variable that even MOCA has no way of measuring.